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Institutions

While cruising around Facebook this morning, I came across this argument against immigration by one Jasen Tenney:

Illegal immigration is down over 50% with Trump and now to get legal immigration way down. Glad to see them go. Since these people are so good for an economy they can make their own crappy home country a better place to live.

Jasen’s argument is somewhat typical of many man-in-the-street arguments against illegal immigration (and immigration in general). If immigration is good for the US, if specifically, these people are really a net benefit to the country) and not, as President Trump said infamously, criminals, rapists, and drug dealers, why don’t they stay in their own country and make it a better place?

A person is more likely to flourish, and help others flourish, in an area with institutions that encourage economic growth than s/he is in an area that discourages or predates upon economic growth. Why produce in an area where property rights are insecure (eg, roving bandits can just steal your stuff, or government can appropriate anything at will)? Even the best producer may not produce anything under such circumstances. But, under a different institutional structure, s/he may thrive.

To return to Jasen’s question that motivated this post: why can’t these immigrants simply return to their “crappy” home country and make it a better place? Quite possibly, because the institutional arrangements necessary to make the country a better place do not exist (or are sufficiently weaker compared to the country the immigrant was headed to)!

Markets are institutions that exist to facilitate exchange, that is, they exist in order to reduce the cost of carrying out exchange transactions. In an economic theory that assumes transaction costs are nonexistant, markets have no function to perform and it seems perfectly reasonable to develop the theory of exchange by an elaborate analysis of individuals exchanging nuts for apples on the edge of a forest or some similar fanciful example.

Many readers of Coase (including economists!) misunderstand him. This is evident in the improperly named Coase Theorem (it’s improper in that it’s not a theorem). In fact, Coase is so often misunderstood, he felt compelled to write the book this quote is from to clarify his point! Coase is often understood to say that, absent transaction costs (or sufficiently low transaction costs), externality issues (eg pollution, noise, etc) can be solved by an allocation of property rights and, regardless of their initial allocation, will result in a Pareto-efficient outcome. This is correct, but only a partial understanding of Coase.

Much of Coase’s work (and work that spun off from him, such as with Armin Alchian, Harold Demsetz, Gordon Tullock, and many others including my own) focus on the role of the market in addressing externality issues. Detractors from Coase argue that his insights, that markets for externalities can exist only if there are no/low transaction costs, are not applicable to the “real world,” since transaction costs abound and, therefore, government intervention is necessary. But this argument represents a misreading of Coase. In a purely ideal world, there would be no transaction costs, but then no market would be necessary. As Coase says in the above quote, it is in the world of transaction costs that the market is most useful! The existence of transaction costs gives rise to firms and other means of human collaboration, which in turn reduce transaction costs, and increase the market exchange of individuals (see The Nature of the Firm (1937) for a more in-depth conversation on this point).

Expanding the idea of markets, firms, and transaction costs to environmental issues, we see the rise of “enviropreneurs” (to use the phrasing of PERC), that is people who seek out and find ways to mitigate these transaction costs in order to achieve desired environmental ends; in short, a market process of environmental concerns (for a detailed look at many different kinds of enviropreneurs, see Free Market Environmentalism for the Next Generation, especially Chapter 9). The fact transaction costs exist is not a detriment to free market environmentalism, like the detractors of Coase argue, but rather what allows it to come about!

Like Coase (and Buchanan and many others) before me, I realize the market is not a panacea. There may be conditions for government to get involved (namely where involvement by the firm or an individual are too costly). But the work of Coase (and Alchian and Demsetz and Buchanan and Tullock and Anderson and many others) show us that the mere existence of an externality and transaction costs is not enough to justify intervention.

It is true that economics is a theoretical science and as such abstains from any judgement of value. It is not its task to tell people what ends they should aim at. It is a science of the means to be applied for the attainment of ends chosen, not, to be sure, a science of the choosing of ends. Ultimate decisions, the valuations and the choosing of ends, are beyond the scope of any science. Science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends.

Far too many economists, both in Mises’ day and today, make the very mistake Mises warns against: treating economics as a science of the choosing of ends. They consider themselves enlightened for building models that can maximize this or minimize that, and then call for said models to influence policy. But building models like such, as Jim Buchanan said in his 1964 paper What Should Economist Do?, is the purview not of economics, but of applied mathematics. Indeed, anyone with even an elementary level of calculus would find such a task trivially easy.

But economics is not this; it is not merely optimizing some constrained function with some universally desired “social goal.” Economics is the study of exchange; Of competing interests for scarce resources and the institutions that arise to deal with these issues. In short, the study of human action.

Following a natural disaster, one can count on two things in the opinion pages and blogosphere: economists of all stripes decrying price-gouging legislation in a disaster and proponents calling economists immoral for questioning such legislation.

The conversation/disagreement between these two is a microcosm of a much larger discussion: the difference between the normative (subjective) and the positive (objective).

Economics is a positive science. It deals with whatis, not what ought to be. When economists argue that price ceilings (like price-gouging legislation) cause shortages, that is a positive claim: it is a claim of what is. This claim can be empirically tested, but it does not reflect the moral positions or suppositions of the economist. In fact, the claim carries with it no moral implications whatsoever. The claim price-gouging legislation causes shortages carries with it no more or less moral weight than the claim the sky is blue.

Conversely, morality is a normative science. It deals with what ought to be, not what is. When moralists argue that raising prices during a disaster is immoral, that is a normative claim: it is a claim of what ought (not) to be. This claim cannot be empirically tested (although it can be tested to see if it falls into various moral criteria). It reflects the belief structure of the person making the claim. The claim raising prices during a disaster is bad carries with it no more or less empirical weight than the claim the sky is blue is good.

Allow me to elaborate, lest I give the mistaken impression that normative and positive sciences are opposed. Normative and positive are not opposed; in fact, they compliment each other quite well. Normative can prevent positive from becoming abusive (think, for example, our modern sensibilities against eugenic human breeding [normative] despite knowing certain traits are genetic [positive]). But positive can also keep normative from being “pie in the sky,” by explaining how the world is. For example, normative claims like “one should not kill his neighbor,” are all well and good, but the positive claim that “murder happens,” is important to know, too. Knowing the two together brings us to the conclusion that police are needed for the few who do break the law.

To apply this reasoning to disasters, knowing price-gouging legislation makes the logistical system worse is important to know, as it can help inform better forms of aid and legislation.

In short, answering a positive claim with a normative claim will get us nowhere, but the two must be given, and understood, concurrently.

At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux has an excellent post on models and their usefulness in economics. Don’s gist is as follows:

Anyone can devise a model to show almost anything. And economics is filled with widely referenced models that are useless (or worse than useless). The Keynesian Cross comes to mind. So, too, the textbook model of so-called “perfect competition” (which, in addition to being a model in which almost everything resembling real-world competition is either squeezed out or appears as a monopolizing (!) tactic, isn’t even logically coherent – for in the model no room exists for any agent actually to change prices).

The value of an economic model is found in its ability to make the world more understandable. Devising a model is no evidence that the named concepts in the model have anything in reality to correspond to them, or that the model is a useful analytical tool.

In short, the mere fact that a model can show that some preferred policy will increase/decrease economic efficiency doesn’t mean said model is of any analytical use. Sure, the minimum wage in a monopsony may improve the situation, but that information does us no good if the market is not a monopsony.

But let’s build upon this idea. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that a given market where a minimum wage is considered is indeed a monopsony. As such, it is theoretically possible that minimum wage would be beneficial, that we would not see, over a given price range, a decline in employment. The poor economist stops here. He might even advocate for minimum wage at this point. But, as Bastiat reminds us, the economist looks for not just the seen effects (ie, what the model says), but the unseen effects, too. The good economist is prompted now to ask “is minimum wage the most cost-effective solution to the problem we are trying to address (in this case, low wages for workers)?” Minimum wage may be an option here, but it may not be the most beneficial option! There may be other options, other institutional arrangements, other agreements that can be reached that will create a better outcome!

Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan drive this point home in their 1962 book The Calculus of Consent. The following is from page 61 of the Liberty Fund Edition of the book (original emphasis):

The most important implication that emerges from the [analytical] approach taken here [in this chapter] is the following: The existance of external effects of private behavior is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for an activity to be placed in the realm of collective choice.

While Tullock and Buchanan are discussing externalities here, we can easily generalize their comment to any form of collective action including minimum wage or other methods used to “improve” monopsonies: The existence of a monopsony market resulting from private behavior is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for a minimum wage to be imposed. The burden of proof requires the good economist to demonstrate that any proposed solution is the best of all available options. Otherwise, the result of the market process, even if less-than-ideal, may be the best choice.

It is easy to play around with models, and any given model may have any number of policy implications. But the mere fact the model suggests Policy A would work doesn’t necessarily mean that Policy A is the best choice. If the costs of imposing A are high, then it may likely end up being a net loss!

Writing at Quillette, Dr. Jonny Anomaly (yes, that’s his real name) discusses immigration, institutions, and why some immigration restrictions may be necessary. It’s an interesting article, although I find his rationale for immigration restrictions rather weak.

Dr. Anomaly writes:

For one thing, the social norms and political institutions that promote prosperity are often quite fragile, as evidenced by recent events in Turkey, and the failure of constitutional democracy to take hold in Iraq after American attempts to replace dictatorship and tribalism with a secular liberal order.

I disagree with his interpretation of the evidence here. The two examples he provides are where a liberal order was forced upon the area, rather than developed naturally. Institutions, when imposed, do tend to be fragile. This is seen in the work of many great developmental economists work (for example, see Doing Bad by Doing Good by Chris Coyne or The Tyranny of Experts by William Easterly). However, where liberal institutions develop naturally, they tend to be highly robust. The United States is an excellent example where despite many shocks to the system over the approximately 250 years of our existence, we remain a highly liberal country. Shocks have included invasion, mass immigration (by both intelligent and less intelligent people), famine, drought, civil war, terrorism, etc. The US is not ideally liberal, and there have been missteps, but the whole thing hasn’t collapsed the way it would have if institutions were inherently fragile.

He goes on to say:

Many supporters of open borders fail to distinguish between different qualities of immigrants. They assume that if a high level of immigration has benefitted some countries in particular eras, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries, then it is simply the quantity of migrants, rather than the composition of migrants, that caused prosperity in these nations. But this is a fallacious inference that depends on the assumption that all people are just as likely to promote the welfare of a country regardless of their values, skills, or traits.

The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t appear, at least prima facie, to be correct. The mass immigration of the 19th and 20th Centuries was not of high-skilled immigrants. Rather the opposite, really: they tended to be the dregs of European society. And yet, America prospered. Those who attempted to turn America toward Socialist institutions were not uneducated immigrants, but rather highly educated native WASPs.

This is not to discount the importance of intelligence in economic activity; quite the opposite. But rather, an economy is made up of all kinds of goods: high quality, low quality and everything in between. A dynamic economy allows all resources to find a niche, including labor.

There’s more I could say on this article, and maybe I will down the line, but I want to finish off with this: the evidence on immigration’s impact on the economy is far from crystal clear. There are copious amounts of evidence pointing in both directions. Given this ambiguity, I argue a liberal society demands that freedom is preserved and that the action which would restrict freedom (in this case, restricting freedom of commerce of the citizens of the society) must be shunned until evidence beyond a reasonable doubt is presented.

Since the time of Adam Smith, high tariffs have been decried by economists as counterproductive to a country’s economic growth. However, in recent years, this consensus has come under scrutiny, not just from the political sector but also the academic sector. Using GDP per Capita as a measure of economic well-being and the Economic Freedom of the World Index to measure freedom to trade, I find a distinct positive effect lower mean tariff rates have on GDP per capita. The size of the effect varies on the income of the country, with the strongest effect on the poorest nations and the weakest effect on the wealthiest nations.

As this is a working paper, any and all constructive comments are welcome!